Our Story

WE BUILD GEAR YOU CAN RELY ON

On a winter’s day in 2015, our founder, Susan Pieper, observed her son using plastic shovels to build snow jumps in her backyard and then leaving them lying around before breaking them on hard pack snow. Susan spent 20 years logging over 10,000 ocean miles (3,000 of which as skipper) on a sailboat in the Pacific and knew that gear matters. If you are “out there” and your gear fails and you’re a sailor, you have to save yourself. She knew that it is worth it to buy quality gear as cheap gear can get you in trouble when you least need it.

With that philosophy in mind, Susan and her former colleague and co-founder, Tom Bennett, looked at the lawn and garden tool market. They observed that emergency and camping shovels were too small to properly save your ass; that military shovels were short-shafted and not effective for everyday use; and that hardware store shovel tools had become plastic and dumbed down. Bottom line: a lot of these tools were total gear failures if your life depended on your gear.

They recognized that people don’t just use tools these days for farming, mining or landscaping but instead use tools for big adventures in the outdoors and that the form factor also needed to be innovated for today’s active consumers. Thus, DMOS™’s Active Tools were born.

In collaboration with a local product design engineering pro, Jack Koehler, they made a prototype, which they called the “Kicker Tool” and gave it to Travis Rice for testing. With his “thumbs up” and later that Fall 2015 endorsement of their “Build Better Jumps” Kickstarter Campaign, DMOS™ was born.

From the beginning, the mantra in our company is that we don’t build a product for pros, we build it with them. DMOS™ exists to build tools that are purpose-built, portable, and engineered to outlast you. DMOS™ is hardware for out there.

our Kickstarter Campaigns

The goal became clear; develop a category of products called Active Tools, in which everyday hardware tools are reimagined for your active life. The DMOS™ brand promise is to make tools that are multi-purpose and smart, engineered to be indestructible, and portable.